Vicissitudes by Kim Green

Vicissitudes by Kim Green

Author:Kim Green [Green, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Romance, African American & Black, women, Lgbtq+, General, Literary Collections, Women Authors, Transgender
ISBN: 9780998252186
Google: 78ArEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Transgress Press
Published: 2021-02-01T00:07:02.047524+00:00


Ten

Death of Democracies

“Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. [...] instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

Hannah Arendt

One of the most constant refrains we heard in the age of Trump was, “this is not normal.” Almost every day, something new tore down norms that had existed for decades, if not hundreds of years. It happened so often that we grew numb to it, and greater and greater outrages were required to provoke any sort of immune response. When the Mueller report revealed Trump’s connections with Russia, it spawned an impeachment. The Senate refused to provide anything more than a pro forma hearing. Later, the Senate Intelligence Committee report was released, and it contained numerous new revelations of how deep the corruption went. It was a tacit acknowledgment that the Senate would not provide any checks on the executive branch.1 The framers of the Constitution had hoped that Congress would put the good of the country ahead of party and prevent demagogues, autocrats, and criminals from controlling executive branch; instead, the legislative branch was enabling a man who was all three.

This has people who study how modern democracies fall into autocracy and fascism extremely worried. The Trump Administration closely hewed to the model of other failed democracies in the post-Soviet era. Indeed, there are some who believe that the likes of Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán of Hungary were actively coaching the Trump Administration and the religious right on how to re-make America in the image of their autocratic, Christian, ethno-nationalist states.2

This chapter examines the characteristics of how post-Cold War governments have been de-democratized from the inside, using Russia, Hungary, Turkey and Poland as examples, and points to similarities occurring in the United States under Trump.

Warnings of Authoritarian Behavior

Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt provided one of the most eye-opening analyses of how modern countries fail in their book, How Democracies Die. They outlined four key indicators of authoritarian behavior. The Trump Administration failed, or nearly failed, all of these tests. This is more startling given that when Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote their book in 2018, they judged that Trump only ran afoul of 7 of the 15 indicators listed above. After two additional years in power, it was 15 out of 15 when he left office.

Rejection (or Weak Commitment to) Democratic Rules of the Game

“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.”

George Orwell

“I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say ‘yes.’ I’m not going to say ‘no.’ And I didn’t last time, either,”

Donald Trump,

when asked in July



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